December 2008 Archives

“And Alyosha held out to him two new, iridescent hundred-rouble bills.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“Praying now, he suddenly happened to feel in his pocket the little pink envelope that Katerina Ivanovna’s maid had given him when she caught up with him in the street. He was troubled, but finished his prayer. Then, after some hesitation, he opened the envelope.”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“ ‘I squash black cockroaches at night with my slipper: they make a little pop when you step on them.’ ”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“ ‘I loved depravity, I also loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty: am I not a bedbug, an evil insect? In short—a Karamazov!’ ”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990.

“Counting the money, I found there was three thousand dollars of ‘green and greasy,’ worn paper money, in small bills.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

“He unrolls the bills, looking at them with a mysterious smile on his fat face. You don’t understand his smile and wonder if he is thinking how he cheated somebody in a poker game; he looks like a gambler.
    The roll interests you, the outside one is what you call a ‘salmon belly.’ It is a yellowback—a big bill.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926. The money is Canadian.

“The wine dumps, where wine bums or ‘winos’ hung out, interested me. Long, dark, dirty rooms with rows of rickety tables and a long bar behind which were barrels of the deadly ‘foot juice’ or ‘red ink,’ as the winos called it.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

“They were both past fifty, wore clean overalls, substantial shoes, and clean-looking blue shirts. A month later I could have classified them correctly as professional bums, too old to ride the trains, satisfied to throw their feet along the ‘star routes,’ or country roads, where food was seldom refused, and to sleep in their bindles, or blankets, under the stars.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

“There are two vertical furrows between my eyes that make me appear to be wearing a continual scowl. My eyes are wide enough apart and not small, but they are hard, cold, calculating. They are blue, but of that shade of blue farthest removed from the violet.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

“Drifting on air without a care
Purple snowflakes
Cover the ground without a sound”

—Marvin Gaye, Purple Snowflakes, 1964.

“[I]n English they have more than three thousand terms for different colors, yet most people can name eight at best. The average person can recognize the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—though people already begin to have trouble with indigo and violet. It takes a lot of experience to learn to distinguish and name the various shades, and a painter is better at it than, say, a taxi driver, who just has to know the colors of traffic lights.”

—Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2005.

“Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”

—Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006.

“The long lost dollar has come back to the fold,
With silver you can turn your dreams to gold.”

—Al Dubin & Harry Warren, “We’re in the Money”, 1933.

“I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us; and for as much red copper as I can bring, I’ll have thrice the weight in gold. Why, man, all their dripping-pans and their chamber-pots are pure gold; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold.”

—Ben Jonson, John Marston & George Chapman, Eastward Ho, 1605.

Someone’s top 11 Christmas cards for computer geeks.

“ ‘She said: “Yes. I’d like to have a different kind of liqueur with my coffee. Something I’ve never heard of. Any suggestions?”
    ‘So I described Verveine; I thought of it because it is the identical green of her eyes. It’s made out of a million-odd mountain herbs; I’ve never found it anywhere outside France and damn few places here. Delicious; but with a kick like bad moonshine. So we had a couple of Verveines, and Kate said: “Yes, indeed. That certainly is different.” ’ ”

—Truman Capote, “Unspoiled Monsters”, Answered Prayers, 1987.

“There is always something wrong with redheads. The hair is kinky, or it’s the wrong color, too dark and tough, or too pale and sickly. And the skin—it rejects the elements: wind, sun, everything discolors it. A really beautiful redhead is rarer than a flawless forty-carat pigeon-blood ruby—or a flawed one for that matter. But none of this was true of Kate. Her hair was like a winter sunset, lighted with the last of the pale afterglow.”

—Truman Capote, “Unspoiled Monsters”, Answered Prayers, 1987.

“Though there was an episode, too unbeveled to have been a dream, in which one wee-houred morning, late last year, Bonnie and I both half-awoke. In sync. In this bed. Half-awoke, sat up, and looked at each other’s thick outlines in the green glow of the alarm’s digital spears; we looked at each other, first with recognition, then a synchronized shock: looked shocked at these each others and shouted, in unison, ‘WHAT?’ and fell on our pillows and back to a puffy sleep. Compared notes at breakfast and both came away shaken.”

—David Foster Wallace, ‘Say Never’, Girl With Curious Hair, 1989.

“The sky is an eye.
    The dusk and the dawn are the blood that feeds the eye.
    The night is the eye’s drawn lid.
    Each day the lid again comes open, disclosing blood, and the blue iris of a prone giant.”

—David Foster Wallace, “Church Not Made With Hands”, Brief Encounters With Hideous Men, 1999.